Dakota Office Products

Abstract

The senior management team of Dakota, an office products distributor, is concerned about the company's first loss in history. Explores the role for activity based costing and customer profitability measurement in a distribution company. Dakota's customers are increasingly demanding more specialized services, such as desktop delivery. Also, whereas some customers have switched to electronic ordering, others continue to place their orders manually. Pricing is based on a fixed markup of the cost of the purchased item. The managers feel that the fixed markup may not be compensating them for the higher costs of manual order processing and desktop delivery. The financial manager initiates an effort to estimate the costs of handling the different types of orders so that she can estimate the profitability of individual customers based on their actual order pattern.

Objectives: To determine how overall cost of anticoagulation therapy for warfarin compares with that of Novel Oral Anticoagulants (NOACs). Also, to demonstrate a scientific, comprehensive, and an analytical approach to estimate direct costs involved in monitoring and management of anticoagulation therapy for outpatients in an academic primary care clinic setting, post-initiation of therapy.

Results: The cost of warfarin management for patients who display unstable International Normalized Ratio (INR) is more than three times those who display stable INR over time. For complex anticoagulation patients, the total cost of medication and monitoring for warfarin anticoagulation therapy is similar to that for NOACs.

Conclusion: Despite warfarin being significantly less expensive to purchase than NOACs, overall warfarin management incurs higher costs due to laboratory monitoring and provider time than NOACs. NOAC treatment, therefore, may not be more expensive than warfarin therapy management for complex anticoagulation patients.

Methods: Two research assistants shadowed attending physicians for a total of 64 hours in the adult emergency department. A tablet-based time recorded was used to obtain estimates for physician documentation time on both control (no scribe) and intervention (scribe) shifts.

Results: Control shifts yielded approximately 3 hours of documentation time per 8 hours of clinical time. When paired with a scribe, attending physician documentation decreased to 1 hour and 45 minutes during a shift and 15 minutes of post-shift documentation. The physician cost estimate for documentation without and with a scribe is 644 and 488 dollars, respectively.

Conclusions: TDABC methodology demonstrated that scribes afford a cost-effective solution to ED clinical documentation. The costing approach enables clinicians to understand utilization and cost of medical resource at a more granular level.

Kurt Meyer, chief risk officer of Swissgrid, the Swiss national electricity transmission system operator, reflects on the risk management system he installed after the deregulation and liberalization of the European energy market. With 41 connections to other European networks, a failure in Swissgrid’s network could interrupt the supply of electricity in Switzerland and much of Europe. Meyer describes the periodic interactive risk workshops conducted at each business unit to identify, assess, and mitigate risks. Executive Risk Workshops focus on the CEO and the company’s leadership team and discuss the business units’ risk profiles and risks that cut across the units, such as safety, weather, and regulatory changes. New and emerging risks are discussed at Extraordinary Risk Workshops. Meyer recently deployed an app on employees’ smartphones for them to easily report anomalies or concerns. Reports from the app are embedded in a new real-time crisis management platform used by several Swiss companies, federal authorities, and the Swiss Army. Despite a full array of risk management tools and processes, Meyer remains concerned about risks yet to be identified.